What We're Reading
1
Binoo John. “Photography in the new Republic. Excerpt from All in a Flash: News Photography in India.” The Hindu, 14 August 2026.
Binoo John writes on the emergence of news photography in post-Independence India, considering how the camera informed the making of a new national public. The published excerpt examines the photographers, publications and institutional structures that shaped photojournalism in the early decades of the republic, attending to the tensions between documenting a rapidly changing society and constructing ideas of modern India. Exceeding its documentary burden, photography appeared as an active participant in determining how the nation perceived itself.
2
Bas Blaasse. “Between pose and presence: on Farren van Wyk’s Mixedness is My Mythology.” 1000 Words, 30 July 2026.
Farren van Wyck’s first solo museum exhibition opened at the Fotomuseum Den Haag, Netherlands, expounding on the tension between intimacy and construction. Bas Blaasse considers this thread in van Wyck’s gesture of turning the camera towards her own family and examines her reflexive reworking of the visual languages of anthropological photography, ethnographic portraiture and colonial representation, especially in how she makes mixed identity, migration and belonging visible. The deliberate staging of the photographs and the repeatedly unsettled familiarity of family portraiture expose the histories embedded within them. Blaasse asks how identity takes shape through photographic images rather than simply being recorded by them as a subject.
3
Samia Halaby. “Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre: An Introduction to the Ongoing Project.” Jadaliyya, 19 January 2014.
Returning to her long-term project of drawing the 1956 Kafr Qasem massacre, Samia Halaby demonstrates what it means to reconstruct an event for which there is little visual documentation. Working through thirteen years of interviews with residents, local archives and historical research, Halaby oscillates between the specificity of individual testimonies and the limitations of translating words into images. Her drawings deliberately resist spectacle, and seek to restore the victims as individuals with dignity and agency, while foregrounding the ethical and formal difficulties of making images of historical violence.
4
Nicholas Gamso. “Speaking across: On migration and storytelling.” e-flux, 13 August 2026.
Drawing on John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Seventh Man (1975), Nicholas Gamso looks at how storytelling creates forms of connection across the tumultuous terrain of migration. Returning to their experimental collaboration of photography, testimony and text, the essay follows what it means to trace experiences that cannot be fully shared or understood via straitjacketed language. Gamso attunes to the possibilities and limits of representation, speaking of how narratives around migration move beyond the demand to be legible and extend into agential spaces for encounter and solidarity.
5
Aditi Patil and Manya Singh. “Two Lahauli Villages Rewrote Forest Governance Through a Tree-Felling Pact.” Land Conflict Watch, 2026.
Aditi Patil and Manya Singh trace how two villages in Himachal Pradesh’s Lahaul valley developed their own system of forest management in the 1990s, imposing a ban on cutting standing juniper trees through gram sabha resolutions. The essay follows the collective labour that has sustained this pact across three decades, from village monitoring and fines to the role of women-led Mahila Mandals in enforcing its terms. Against newer pressures from climate change, tourism and development, the story foregrounds the commons as a space of negotiation, restraint and locally held ecological knowledge.
6
Abhishek Vajjala and Muskan Soni. “Are We Asking the Wrong Questions About Women’s Work and Falling Fertility?” The Wire, 14 August 2026.
Abhishek Vajjala and Muskan Soni study the assumed trade-off between women’s participation in paid work and declining fertility, arguing that the real missing variable is care. Foregrounding the gendered distribution of unpaid labour in India and elsewhere, the essay shifts attention from the reproductive choices women make to the social infrastructures that make care possible—or leave it to families, disproportionately women, to absorb. It makes a case for investing in formal care economies as not only a demographic or labour market intervention but a question of how societies distribute the work of sustaining, growing and building lives.
7
Bharathy Singaravel. “H&M signs historic agreement with TN supplier to end gender violence in garment factories.” The News Minute, 6 April 2022.
Bharathy Singaravel examines a landmark agreement between H&M, Tamil Nadu based supplier Eastman Exports and the Dalit women-led Tamil Nadu Textile Common Labour Union (TTCU) addressing gender based violence in garment factories. Emerging from TTCU’s campaign for justice following the rape and murder of worker Jeyesre Kathiravel, the agreement makes brands and suppliers accountable through elected shop-floor monitors, workplace-wide training and mechanisms for reporting and redressal. Singaravel positions the intersection of caste and gender in shaping violence at the workplace, while tracing the collective organising and transnational solidarity that made the agreement possible.
8
Naghmeh Sohrabi. “The True Things: A Conversation with Naghmeh Sohrabi.” Bidoun, 2026.
Historian Naghmeh Sohrabi discusses These Are the True Things, her personal Substack project documenting and translating critical writing emerging from Iran amid war, repression and information blackouts. Reflecting on the politics of mediation, she considers the limits of diaspora narratives and the flattening of Iranian lives into images of suffering, arguing instead for attention to the intellectual, political and everyday lives unfolding within the country. She also speaks about her evolving practice as a writer and archivist, and the collaborative networks through which she has continued to gather texts, testimonies and fragments that might otherwise remain inaccessible.
9
Himanshi Aggarwal and Harishankar Manoj. “Self-Identification Under Threat: India’s Transgender Law Continues to be Challenged.” The Polis Project, 14 August 2026.
Himanshi Aggarwal and Harishankar Manoj make visible the challenges to India’s 2026 amendment to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, which replaces the principle of self-identification with narrower, state-defined categories and medical certification. Underscoring the experiences of transgender people navigating identity documents, healthcare, housing and community networks, the essay follows how the amendment shifts authority over gender from individuals to the state. It also foregrounds the multiple intersections of caste, gender and cultural identity, asking what happens when laws framed as protection deepen surveillance, exclusion and the criminalisation of support.
10
Olivia Laing and Jamaica Kincaid. “In Conversation.” Granta, 10 December 2024.
Both writers—and women—who return poetically, critically and instinctively to the garden as a site of inspiration and community, Olivia Laing and Jamaica Kincaid speak to the garden as a convergence where histories of violence, labour, ownership and ecological change remain embedded. Moving between horticulture, colonialism and their own practices of gardening and writing, they reflect on the garden as an archive—one that can conceal histories of extraction and inequality, while also transforming into a space for attention, disturbance and thinking. Their conversation also highlights unruly processes of writing and cultivation, and the forms of knowledge that emerge through tending, observing and allowing things to resist control.
11
Bupinder Singh Bali and Indupriya B. “Why the Threat Is Always Rape.” The Wire, 11 August 2026.
In this conversation, Naguib Mahfouz reflects on a lifetime of writing shaped by political upheaval, censorship and philosophical inquiry. Revisiting his ideas on craft, religion, freedom and the novel, he opines on his literary work as a way of thinking through the moral and social contradictions of modern Egypt. Mahfouz discusses the relationship between fiction, politics and everyday life, returning to what constitutes the responsibilities of the novelist as an enduring commitment to observing and questioning the world.
12
Thomas Hallock. “Hands and Fins and Feet.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 August 2026.
Beginning with the death of a goliath grouper during Florida’s 2021 red tide, Thomas Hallock traces the historical separation of humans from other forms of life through the intertwined histories of taxonomy, colonialism and modern science. Moving from Descartes’ cogito to contemporary debates around animal sentience, Hallock challenges the cerebrocentric assumption that thought and feeling are located primarily in the human brain; he asks what might emerge from our efforts to recognise our shared biological and sensory capacities and kinships with other species.
